After a natural disaster, such as a flood, earthquake, tornado, or other calamity, helicopters, planes, and other rescue vehicles are often deployed as part of a search and rescue effort to help survivors. While such efforts can be successful in locating and assisting survivors, currently available solutions for assisting survivors of a natural disaster have various limitations. For instance, survivors often must communicate with rescue vehicles using basic signaling techniques, such as starting fires, waving clothing or flags, using reflective surfaces to direct light, or spelling out short messages using rocks, debris, or other moveable objects. Unfortunately, such techniques are incapable of communicating more sophisticated information, such as a number of survivors, whether any of the survivors are in need of medical attention or medicine, whether the survivors have access to food, water, and shelter, etc., making it difficult to allocate rescue resources to survivors according to need and urgency.